The 1918 flu, the 'Spanish Flu' was the biggest and fastest killer to hit humans since the Black Death in the 1300's. That erased between more than half the population of Europe in just a few years. I have heard that the population did not recover to the number before the Plague for 300 years.
Modern medicine is no real consolation to me on this one. Just as the death toll in natural disaster keeps increasing because there are that many more people to kill, so too an aggressive adapting disease will spread far faster than any of our systems can control. There is a good symbolic reason for naming an outbreak of an alien or neo disease a 'wild-fire situation'. Just as with the right wind and fuel-load a brush fire can blow up from a dozen acres to thousands in a few hours, an aerosol infection can flare up in a relative instant.
One of the things that saved humanity from both the Black Death and the Spanish Flu was the the fact that travel was slow. The Plague arrived by sailing ship and traveled no faster than a good horse and the Spanish Flu was limited by the speed of railroads and Steamships. And since communication was in 1918 and, even in the 1300's faster than the spread of the disease, warnings went out ahead of the death front. As well, 90 percent of the world was in both cases agricultural and spread out which meant that communities could isolate and quarantine themselves and others and let the disease kill its hosts and burn out. It is interesting to note that the first cases of Spanish Flu have been identified, the source was an US army depot and staging station in Kansas. From there the infection was carried to other parts of the US and on to Europe with the US soldiers entering WWI. It killed far more people in far less time than all the consequences of the war did. People did not travel much, travel far, or travel fast.
The are big difference between the Black Death and the Spanish flu. It takes time for bubonic plague carried by infected fleas (which requires bite to bite transmission like malaria) to turn into pnuemonic plague which is transmitted directly from human to human by sneezing or touching (like the common cold). Living in plague country as I do doctors are quick to test for plague and treat it before it becomes pnuemonic or fatal.
Secondly, plague was indiscriminate, it infects everybody unless they have some natural immunity and can burn itself out by killing its host before they can transmit it. The Spanish flu, in sharp contrast to earlier and later flu strain, primarily attacked people in their prime and not children or the old who normally are the groups most at risk. Like the current flying-pig flu in Mexico.
Thirdly, plague is a bacteria and flu is a virus. It is quite likely that modern bubonic plague is not the same disease that struck in the 1300. Or rather the 1300's plague was a wild variant of plague which appeared out of Asia flashed around the world and burnt out leaving behind immune survivors. (On a curious note, there is some evidence to suggest that the genetic traits that allowed some medieval people to resist and survive the plague have given their descendants greater resistance to HIV infection.)
The viral nature of flu means that it can and does mutate constantly, the strains combine and separate constantly as they travel thru one species of host after another, pig to bird to man and round and round again, vary similar in a way to a computer program attempting to break a security system by trying all the possible variations and combinations of variations to find the key-code. Think of massive parallel processing where every human, pig, and bird on the planet is running its own investigatory program and periodically sharing viable results with all the other systems.
Do you now catch a glimmer of my fear? It has been said that courage is solid evidence for a lack of imagination, I rather agree with this.
If, dear reader, you think I make too much of this, then consider...this is signs and portents and a red sky at morning.
How panic makes goobers of us all... This swine flu looks like a dud compared with the 38,000 Americans ordinary average flu kills every year. A little panic goes a long way when my meds aren't working well. On the other hand, it is absolutely fascinating to watch people running in circles screaming about nothing! Perhaps there is some truth to the idea that this is a panic manufactured to panicking the lumpen proletariat into demanding security over liberty. Bunch-a-monkey time again!
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